Movies: Expectations Matter

I have watched three of 2005's bigger movies this week: "A History of Violence," "Good Night, and Good Luck," and Pride & Prejudice." I enjoyed the last the most, surprisingly, perhaps because my expectations for it were lowest.

Pride & Prejudice is not a very good movie. Part of the problem is that it is so predictable, even for those who, like me, have never read the book(s). It's plotline is pure Harlequin Romance: beautiful, intelligent, spirited and iconoclastic but penniless girl from the ranks of second-rate gentry wins (after many false starts and misunderstandings and almost despite her own and his best efforts) the heart and hand of the rich, darkly handsome and (of course) brooding high society hunk to live happily ever after despite the impediments of the Victorian class structure. (Yawn). Another part of the problem lies in trying to reproduce in two hours the entire plot line of a Victorian novel. The elisions this requires makes the movie so choppy that you half expect to see Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch somewhere in the credits. And then there is the acting -- or much of it. Keira Nightly, as Lizzie Bennet, is luminous and the only consistently good thing about the movie. And Donald Sutherland, as the Bennet patriarch, has his moments, particularly in the very final scene in the movie when, with a palpable mixture of anguish and elation, he accepts his favorite daughter's protestations of love and "let's her go" to marry Darcy. The interplay between Nightly and Sutherland in that final scene is the highlight of the entire movie. But the rest of the cast, and particularly Matthew Macfadyen as Darcy and Brenda Blethyn as Mrs. Bennet are hard to watch. Ms. Blethyn is ridiculously emotive, even for the character she plays, and Macfadyen is so wooden that the attraction Lizzie is supposed to feel for him never seems remotely believable. From the moment he appears on the screen, you know that he and Lizzie will eventually be "an item," yet at no point can you bring yourself to believe that anyone like Lizzie would ever be anything but bored to tears with Macfadyen's Darcy.

Still, for all of that, I actually enjoyed P&P more than I did either of the other two, since I went into with far lower expectations.

"A History of Violence" got rave reviews and to read the reviews one would have thought that this movie would be a nuanced treatment of how violence breeds violence despite the best efforts of good men to avoid it. It really is nothing of the kind. It is a Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde remake, with Viggo Mortensen alternately playing Kevin Costner (think Message in a Bottle) and Steven Segal (think any movie he has ever made). The best part of the movie is the interplay between father and son, with the suggestion that the talent for mayhem the father is trying to escape has actually been passed down to the son, who starts like Costner and ends like Segal. After the emergence of the father's Mr. Hyde, the son beats the local high school bully senseless and then kills with a shotgun a man who is threatening his father. Since this is the only time in the entire movie that the father needs help killing everyone around no matter what the odds, the scene has the feel of having been entirely contrived and inserted into the movie solely to make the "sins of the father" point. Yet, still, Mortensen does a creditable job of conveying, without saying a word, both his gratitude for (and a certain pride in) his son's help and his angst at the realization that his son has turned out to be just like Dad.

There is so much in this movie that is just ridiculous that it is hard to credit it as being anything more than a pretentious martial arts movie. The hero, Tom Stall (fka Joey Cusak) has lived the Midwestern idyll long enough and convincingly enough to have a wife and a ~16 year old son who have no inkling that their husband/father was/is a ruthless killing machine. Yet, when a threat finally arises, Tom turns into Joey (Mr. Hyde) so quickly and smoothly -- and viciously -- that it is impossible to believe Joey had been in hiding for 20 years. The point of the movie, of course, is that "Joey" never was -- never could be -- really gone. The most he could be was repressed. But, one does not entirely repress Joey's types of talents, instincts and proclivities for close to twenty years and yet have them immediately available when needed. The relationship between Tom and his wife (a lawyer for some strange reason) is similarly weird. She has been married to this man for nearly 20 years, and tells him early in the movie he is "the best man she has ever known," yet becomes convinced he is a stranger and that their entire life has been a lie, almost literally at the drop of a body. And, the son. Covincingly presented at the outset as the 95 pound weakling whose only defense is a quick wit and a willingness to use that wit to abase himself to avoid having to fight, he suddenly turns entirely ruthless and entirely capable of killing with his bare hands at the flip of what we are invited to assume is some DNA-based switch. Then there is the whole question of how Tom/Joey got these skills in the first place -- skills sufficient, in the end, to kill bare-handed an entire house full of organized crime "made men" in about one minute. Tom can't be 40 when we see him, and he has lived the Indiana idyll for at least half of that without using the talents that end up saving him. One can understand, perhaps, the development of the requisite sociopathy for this sort of mayhem at an early age. But it is pretty hard to imagine that he was able to develop the sorts of skills required by the time he was 20 and then was able to maintain those skills in razor-sharp condition for another 20 years of living the simple life of a small-town diner owner, husband and father. The central dilemma of the movie has less to do with the history of violence than it does with the problem of creating a character who is old enough to have become first a highly skilled killer and then the father of a sixteen year old boy and is yet young enough to kill nearly a dozen armed tough guys 2, 3 qand then 6 at a time, mostly with his bare hands, the last six after being shot in the shoulder with a 9 mm. The "willing suspension of disbelief" will only go so far.

I won't deny that "A History of Violence" is a good watch. It is. Ed Harris is great, as usual, and Viggo Mortensen shows some acting range that one would not have expected given the previous performances I have seen (Lord of the Rings and Hidalgo). But for all of that, I was disappointed to have what I expected to be a complex treatment of violence and the difficulty of escaping one's past turn out to be little more than a decent martial arts movie dolled up with some heavy-handed efforts at social/generational commentary.

The biggest disappointment of all, though, was "Good Night, and Good Luck." Of the three, this is probably the best movie. But I was again frustrated by my expectations. Edward R Murrow and his face-off with Joe McCarthy have a nearly iconic status for me. That was a battle against evil, and I have always taken the fact that Murrow prevailed as evidence of a fundamental ability of this country to eventually work its way out of hysteria and of the important role that a free, intelligent and principled press can plays in catalyzing that transformation. Given the importance I attach to that story, any 2-hour presentation of it was almost certainly doomed to be a disappointment. I knew that much going in. But (director) George Clooney's treatment of the history fell so far short of even my tempered expectations that I was left thinking, "This is one of the greatest stories in American history and THAT is all you could do with it!?"

For one thing, the movie begins and ends with a preachy speech by Murrow on the potential of television to educate and enlighten, and the degree to which it (even then, I guess) was falling far short of that ideal. I have no idea whether the speech attributed to Murrow was one he actually made or whether Clooney put these words into his mouth for his own purposes. But the net effect was the same: George Clooney sermonizing on how badly television has failed us. The irony of this, of course, is that this sermon begins and ends a movie about one case -- perhaps Clooney believes the only case -- when television generally and television news in particular did not fall short, when it did in fact serve exactly the purpose Clooney (and the rest of us to some degree or another) wish it more consistently would. To bookend a story about Murrow v. McCarthy with a speech about the failures of television to educate creates a remarkable cognitive dissonance. If Clooney had been able to find no better (i.e. less ham-handed) way than a sermon to deliver his indictment, he should have at least left the story alone and come up afterward (in color) to deliver the sermon himself. "Ladies and Gentlemen, you have just witnessed perhaps the greatest moment in television history and certainly one of the greatest moments in the history of journalism. Compare that to the wasteland that is today's television news; compare Edward R Murrow to William O'Reilly and weep for a "paradise lost." Or something to that effect.

But, I could have forgiven the preachy bookends if the middle had been better. Clooney decided to approach the story in his best Jack Webb imitation: "just the facts, ma'am; nothing but the facts." As a consequence, the movie has a sort of news-reel quality to it, alternating back and forth between news clips from the McCarthy hearings, portions of Morrow's own broadcasts, and re-enacted meetings among Morrow, Friendly, Paley and CBS staffers in which they plot their strategy and try (unsuccessfully) to convey the import of and risk inherent in what they are doing. The problem with this approach is that there are far too many facts. The story is too complex to be captured in a news reel. The result is that there is no drama worthy of the name. The destruction McCarthy wrought and the hysteria of the times never come through. Rather than creating a sense of the times and the risks, the movie settles for telling you McCarthy is bad and that what CBS is doing is risky. Unfortunately, the movie provides no reason to believe either of these points. McCarthy himself comes off as a clown, which of course significantly dilutes the believability of Murrow's and CBS's accomplishment in bringing him down. And, the efforts to convey a sense of the times fail utterly. The most important of these efforts is the suicide of one CBS journalist who had been branded as a "pinko" by McCarthy and his supporters. But, even this does not bring the stakes home because the movie provides so little sense of context that no believable reason for suicide is presented. Apart from that, the movie's efforts at conveying angst and risk are largely confined to long closeups of Murrow in what I assume is intended to be anguished contemplation. Yet, so little context is provided that the reason for Morrow's anguish -- and thus the believability of the anguish itself -- is almost entirely absent from the movie.

I'd actually encourage everyone to see all three of these movies, since for all of their flaws, they are all worth the investment of two hours of your time. Just don't have too many expectations. They will ruin all three.